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PORTSIDE CULTURE

“THE WOLVES CAME”  
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Richard Steigmann-Gall
May 11, 2025
The Society for U.S. Intellectual History USIH Blog
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_ Reviewer Steigmann-Gall considers what took so long for so many,
including some left wing public intellectuals, to publicly acknowledge
that Trumpism is fascism. _

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_Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America_
Edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
W.W. Norton
ISBN-13: 9781324074397

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would
finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from
Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and which has found itself renewed
intermittently, depending on election cycles or new political crises.
A PhD student of Samuel Moyn’s at Columbia University, so far in his
career he has followed closely in his Doktorvater’s intellectual and
political footsteps. His polemical takes on social media will likely
be familiar to those who follow him on Twitter. This book – or
rather, its introduction – constitutes a no less polemical
intervention. So closely has Steinmetz-Jenkins followed his mentor’s
lead, it has even been suggested that Moyn plopped the assignment in
Steinmetz-Jenkins’ lap.
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One can perhaps imagine why; it is rare for a collection of essays on
a topic to have as explicit an agenda as this one. As
Steinmetz-Jenkins puts it in his introduction, he seeks to “put the
fascism debate to rest.” The sheer quantity of endorsements for this
volume, from the elite circles of American academe, would seem to add
weight to an apparently decisive blow that Steinmetz-Jenkins sought to
land with this volume.

Little did Steinmetz-Jenkins know that, within a year of its
publication, his volume would go from being a triumphant coup-de-grace
against the liberal tyrannophobes, to an artifact of the shortest
victory lap ever taken. Trump’s decisive acts since his second
inaugural – from deporting resident aliens without due process; to
mass firings within the federal bureaucracy; to populating the
leadership of that bureaucracy with a gallery of ideologically-driven
appointments wholly lacking in experience or expertise; to initiating
the end of birth-right citizenship – have astonishingly led the most
trenchant critics to finally concede that yes, Trumpism is fascism.
Where actual experts of fascism like Robert Paxton waited no longer
than J6 to “call it,” self-identified leftist intellectuals like
Moyn or Corey Robin, whose expertise lay elsewhere but whose social
following is much larger, were insistent right up to January 2025 that
Trumpism could not be fascism. Within five days of each other, in
March both Robin and Moyn threw in the towel.
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Their much more pugnacious satrap, Daniel Bessner, more petulantly
declared that he was “exiting” the debate. Within a few weeks, two
of the most persistent voices of the “It Can’t Happen Here” side
of this running argument of ten years duration joined the “It Has
Happened Here” side. The raison-d’être of this volume vanished.
Steinmetz-Jenkins was left holding the bag.

The body chapters of this collection are all pre-published, and one
presumes Steinmetz-Jenkins curated his list based on what he perceived
– largely correctly – to be signal contributions to a broader
debate about what fascism historically meant, how it was defined, and
whose interests it serves. Classics of leftist analysis are thrown in
– not least Trotsky and Angela Davis – along with what seem to be
seminal contributions to the current debate, such as those of De
Grazia, Gordon, and Evans. While the selections on current events are
meant to lend the appearance of balance, the weight of the
contributions tilts very heavily, with only Churchwell’s and
Stanley’s chapters unambiguously stating that Trumpism is fascism.
And the “last word” of each section favors Steinmetz-Jenkins’
own side. Curiously, some of the pieces make no mention of fascism at
all, preferring instead to launch jeremiads against liberalism.
Imagine a volume on the politics of female bodily autonomy edited by
the American Life League which makes a putative attempt to include
both sides of the debate but concludes with a chapter by Clarence
Thomas. The results here are similarly orchestrated and similarly
predictable.

The real question to be asked is not how Steinmetz-Jenkins’ mentors
finally changed their minds, but what kept them so long? A clue was
offered by Moyn, a contributor to this volume, who tweeted after
Paxton declared J6 to be fascist: “FWIW, my reluctance was and is
rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of
the likely political consequences of certain framings.”

To wit: if we call it fascism, we declare the wolves have indeed
arrived and we must do all we can to stave them off. Including
coalescing with the very “centrist” liberals that socialists
viewed as their main ideological adversary, ever since Senator Hilary
Clinton voted for the Second Iraq War. Leftist scholars like Robin,
Moyn, Bessner, Steinmetz-Jenkins and others found in Jacobin Magazine
a focal point for articulating this vision. As Jacobin contributors
saw it in 2016, Bernie Sanders was their opportunity to tear down a
Clintonite, neoliberal status quo; liberal warnings that Trump was a
fascist had to either be overreactions or knowing deceptions meant to
stifle their burgeoning movement.

This political posture then informed the scholarly takes. When Dylan
Riley, for instance, insisted in 2015 that “Donald Trump is not a
fascist, and yes it matters very much that he is not one,” the cat
of leftist scholarship on this question was let out of the bag: “In
historical terms this process of disintegration opens up opportunities
for the Left. The collapse of a major US political party, if it were
to happen, can only be welcomed. In this context we should reject
absolutely the hysterical lesser-evilism implicit in calling him a
‘fascist’; it is both historically inaccurate and politically
disastrous because it plays into the logic of supporting whomever
emerges from the Democratic Party primary.”
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Without perhaps intending to, Riley at that early point gave the game
entirely away. Until Robin and Moyn finally signaled their concession
that Trumpism was fascism – because their particular Rubicon of
fascist praxis had finally been crossed – this politically
overdetermined agenda united leftist scholars and led to some very
tortured scholarly positions. Whether it was Moyn deciding that
historical comparison was now methodologically suspect; or Robin
insisting that for something to be fascist it must have absolutely no
precedent; or Steinmetz-Jenkins explaining away as “neurosis” the
entirety of meticulous scholarship on Trumpism as fascism, the
contortions were self-evident. The possibility that fascism
historically rears its head as a set of articulated demands before it
turns to the “praxis” of violence was always discounted in these
arguments; such critics would have proclaimed Hitler not a fascist
after the Beer Hall Putsch, since it failed. Outside this volume,
Riley made an even more outlandish claim that Trumpism couldn’t be
fascism because the Soviet Union no longer existed.
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This was only one particularly strained effort at a sort of
“originalism,” akin to being told that a Sunday mass couldn’t be
Catholic because it wasn’t delivered in Latin.

We must consider the possibility that self-described socialists in
this debate so strenuously denied that Trump is a fascist, not because
they didn’t see it, but because it got in the way of their politics.
As published intellectuals with followings on social media, they saw
an opportunity to become “citizen scholars” and convince their
following that here was an opportunity to strike a blow against
capitalism. Rallying around Clinton or Biden threw up a barrier to
this deeper objective. In this framing, Trumpist racism, xenophobia
and misogyny became epiphenomenal to the question of class – the
symptoms of bigotry could not be treated without dealing with its
perceived roots in neoliberalism. Pausing the struggle against
liberalism would forfeit what they saw as a real moment of
opportunity. If Trump was publicly acknowledged as a fascist, this
eschatology would be compromised. So, the argument had to be refuted;
politics had to overrule evidence. Underneath this insistence, for
many it was hoped that Trump would be the trigger for a Marxist
resurrection.

Occasionally, the anti-anti-fascists did let slip. In a since-deleted
tweet from November 12 2020, volume contributor Nikhil Singh expressed
the view: “I don’t care if Trump is personally fascist. I may even
agree that his political sympathies run in that direction. I do not
agree that we’re in a political situation devolving into fascism;
such descriptions at do not illuminate our actual political
challenges.”

Here was something of a confession: yes, it’s fascism. Where others
denied it could be, Singh at least conceded it was. Daniel Bessner, in
a since-deleted tweet three days after J6, stated: “I don’t see
liberals as the far right; I see liberals as more of a threat to
democracy and the general well-being than the far right.”

Here again was a bald statement from a volume contributor that the
fight against Trumpism was at best a distraction. Liberals were the
greater danger.

That socialist voices couldn’t agree as to whether Trumpism was
fascism, or that it was but that this didn’t matter, reveals a
deeper tension. Do we deny Trump is fascist, or openly admit we
don’t care? Denying Trump’s fascism would have its utility, since
this would be a necessary step to overcome the “neurosis” being
generated by liberals who were abusing the f-word as part of their own
ploy to snuff out the Bernie challenge. Calling it fascism but adding
“liberalism is worse” sounded calamitously partisan and
emotionally dissonant. But all that quickly became irrelevant with
Moyn’s and Robin’s _volte-face_. Bessner, for his part, has
indicated that he has “nothing more to say” on this question.
Which leaves only Steinmetz-Jenkins, who two weeks after Moyn’s
concession was still mocking the “eternally annoying fascism
debate” – presumably not a judgment on his own work on this
volume. That his own mentor has now joined the neurotics, however,
gives us pause to consider whether Steinmetz-Jenkins’
characterization wasn’t perhaps a case of projection.

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“I have since turned out to be wrong. They have set off multiple
conflagrations. And I have been shaken out of my skepticism.”
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About the Reviewer
Richard Steigmann-Gall is Associate Professor of History at Kent State
University. He is the author of _The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of
Christianity
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UP), which has translations out or forthcoming in Portuguese, Italian,
Spanish and Polish. His academic research and publishing concern
church and state under Nazism, religion and fascism, and the religious
roots of “scientific” racism. His current research and publishing
has led him to Transatlantic comparisons, with recent work including
articles on “Star-Spangled Fascism
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and “The Genocidal Vision of the Silver Shirts
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* Fascism
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* Donald Trump
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* public intellectuals
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